Analytics boost social marketing efforts

Sandra Gittlen |
March 1, 2013

Acting quickly on the correct data helps engage more customers.

Marketing gets stuck on lead generation, he says, instead of looking at the real value of social media. "Social marketing is less about converting clicks into deals and more about creating relationships. Eventually the trust built causes people to buy and that's how you monetize social marketing," Fidelman says, although there are no hard-and-fast numbers that prove that assertion.

Before that can happen, businesses must bust up internal roadblocks such as a tendency to hoard information and maintain silos. Social marketing relies on cross-departmental collaboration to extract the most value from feedback and analytics.

For social marketing to reach maximum maturity, IT must be involved in strategy, which is not standard practice in organizations today. Marketing teams either go it alone or hire outsourcers to meet IT needs.

Primarily, IT must be on board because data gathered from social media platforms must be fed into back-end systems for analysis that can be distributed throughout the organization to inform decisions. Keeping that data out of reach defeats its purpose and diminishes its power, according to Fidelman.

By partnering with IT early on, he says, companies can achieve the holy grail of social marketing: providing customers the right message at the right time on the right platform and in the right context.

Publishers Clearing House (PCH) shares this vision, already giving social marketing equal visibility with television and online advertising, events and direct marketing.

PCH engages its audience through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ and other popular platforms. The company has already amassed more than 1 million fans across its multiple Facebook pages.

"Technology is continuing to be strategic in capturing more and more data to be fed into our data warehouse to better identify customer segments and build better user engagement experiences that traverse all our properties and programs," says Deborah Holland, executive vice president at Publishers Clearing House.

"Our goal is to have a large-scale, highly engaged audience," says Deborah Holland, an executive vice president at PCH. Holland and her team assess the success of social marketing via Salesforce.com's Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly Buddy Media) analytics software. Users can analyze comments, tweets and other types of posts based on pre-determined filters and tags, along with popular metrics such as Facebook likes and fans and Twitter followers.

Although PCH's social media reporting tools don't interface with other enterprise systems currently, if a social platform user registers or opts into the PCH email program, then he or she is tracked as having come from the social channel.

PCH relies on the resulting data to target content and respond to customer demand. Analytics recently revealed that consumers enjoy in-depth profiles of winners as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses with employees, so PCH beefed up that type of content.